SEATTLE  The scenes wouldn't be noteworthy in most parts of the world, but in America, they are rare.

The Brougham End, where fans stand and cheer and chant for the entire game. The March to the Match, during which hundreds of fans and a 53-piece marching band fill the streets with color and noise on their way to Qwest Field, of which seats are filled by noisy, enthusiastic fans swathed in blue and green.

These are not fans of Manchester United or Barcelona or AC Milan or River Plate or any of the world's most famous soccer clubs. They wear the colors of Seattle Sounders FC, the expansion Major League Soccer franchise that is leading the league in attendance and merchandise sales, according to MLS.

The Sounders, the 15th franchise to join the league, also are succeeding on the field. They are second in the Western Conference with a 7-3-8 mark and trying to become the first expansion team since 1998 to make the playoffs.

"This is kind of an international city, and our ownership group gets it," says Gary Wright, a veteran of three decades in the NFL's Seattle Seahawks front office and now the Sounders senior vice president of business operations. "Our goal is to be a flagship."

The Sounders average 30,204 fans a game, which is nearly double the league average of 15,559. They already have set a league record by selling about 24,000 season tickets and are on pace to smash the record average attendance set by the Los Angeles Galaxy (28,916) in 1996, the league's inaugural year.

Because of demand, team management has increased capacity for MLS games from an original figure of 27,000 to 32,400.

The upper section of Qwest Field is closed off for MLS games but used for major international matches, such as the visit by English Premier League club Chelsea on July 18. The attendance that day was 65,289, just shy of the 67,000 capacity for an NFL game, and team executives hope to top that when Spanish and European champion Barcelona comes to town Aug. 5.

"People have asked me if I'm really surprised by this, and there's part of me that is, but there's part of me that's not," says Tod Leiweke, the Sounders CEO and president of the Seahawks, whose ownership group also owns a share of the MLS team. "We worked really hard, we put a lot of the right pieces in place. And when you do that, the fans step up."

In the last few weeks, numerous American cities have hosted huge crowds for international soccer games. But those attendances have seldom translated directly to the selling of an American soccer league.

Seattle's soccer history

In Seattle, the clout and expertise of an NFL operation has catered to a market steeped in soccer. Earlier incarnations of the Sounders included a thriving North American Soccer League team that folded in 1983, one year before the league collapsed, and up until last year a team in the United Soccer Leagues Division I, a minor league tier of competition just below MLS.

"We didn't coin the phrase, but we started talking about, 'This is the world's game, it's a little bit different, it's a little bit special.' We wanted to keep its traditions in mind. We also wanted to do everything on a major league level," Wright says.

It is this approach that differentiates the Sounders from two other attempts to incorporate an MLS team into an NFL operation. Kraft Sports manages the New England Patriots and MLS' New England Revolution, and Hunt Sports Group, owner of the Kansas City Chiefs, married some operations with that of the MLS Wizards before it sold the soccer team in 2006.

Perhaps 20 people work mostly for the Sounders, but the workload is shared by another 100 employees of the Seahawks and other entities, including Vulcan Sports and Entertainment, formed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen to run his sports teams and other enterprises.

"Microsoft doesn't sponsor sports teams, as a rule," says goalie Kasey Keller, a former U.S. World Cup star and also a native of Washington who came to MLS after playing 17 years in Europe. "To have XBOX on the front of our jerseys is huge."

It's also a sponsorship deal valued at $20 million over five years, according to Sports Business Daily.

"It's the perfect storm of very committed ownership, very integrated relationship with the Seahawks, very passionate, experienced soccer people on the competitive side and on the business side," MLS Commissioner Don Garber says. "It's a market that doesn't have a lot of competition."

Once Roth joined as lead investor in 2007 and agreed to pay most of a $30 million expansion fee, he and Hanauer set about the task of building a winner.

The Sounders hired head coach Sigi Schmid, who had just won the 2008 MLS championship with the Columbus Crew. They'd already signed Swedish midfielder Freddie Ljungberg as a designated player, a mechanism by which two-thirds of his $1.3 million annual salary doesn't count against the per-team salary cap of $2.3 million.

The Seattle market for soccer has been compared to the environment in Europe by players who have been on teams in both places. "For sure, it feels like in Europe," Ljungberg said after a 2-1 win against the San Jose Earthquakes last month in which he set up the winning goal. "They are almost nuts in the stands sometimes. It's a great atmosphere. I had fans here today from back home in Sweden, and their kids had my Seattle jersey, and they were saying, 'It's great, like the days at Arsenal. You must love it.'

"And I do. It's great."

International connection

The sheen will come off Qwest Field in a month or so, when the prominent logos and yard markings for NFL games show up alongside the minimalist soccer lines. The unforgiving artificial turf isn't conducive to some elements of top-class soccer, such as slide tackling and passes with backspin losing speed. And not every soccer event is a blockbuster: 15,387 fans watched a CONCACAF Gold Cup doubleheader involving the USA this month (The USA, however, didn't use its first string).

The connection to the international game is maintained in creative ways.

Sounders fans who bought season tickets received them in a Rave Green box, with the tickets stitched into a Sounders scarf. Besides the 15 home league matches, those buyers received three additional games, at the time unspecified, which have since turned out to be the exhibitions vs. Chelsea and Barcelona as well as MLS Cup 2009, the league's championship game in November.

The Sounders aren't just putting fans in seats. According to MLS, they are first in merchandise sales and Ljungberg's jersey is fourth in sales, behind that of David Beckham, Cuauhtemoc Blanco and Landon Donovan.

MLS has been unable to capture this type of success in other large cities, however. And franchises that were started in cities with large Hispanic populations, such as Miami and Tampa, did not find an expected niche. Seattle, like Toronto, is establishing a different footprint.

"There are similarities (in Seattle) with Toronto. There you have an international, cosmopolitan city with a very successful sports organization, the Maple Leafs, running the show. In Seattle you have the same kind of market and the same kind of expertise with the Seahawks," Garber says.

The challenge for MLS is replicating this success in other cities, such as Philadelphia, which is getting an expansion franchise in 2010, and Portland and Vancouver, which will join in 2011.

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